


Andalite Bonsai

by baezil



Category: Animorphs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:28:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26844415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baezil/pseuds/baezil
Summary: The only andalite on earth, Ax tries to remember his home
Kudos: 10





	Andalite Bonsai

**Author's Note:**

> “What?” I didn’t see what he was pointing at.
> 
> “You have a word for something like that?” I asked. 
> 
> he explained.
> 
> \- Animorphs #5, The Message

Ax discovers the moss that grows on the rocks around the barn and in the woods. It is not good to eat, but it still intrigues him. The long, thin stalks of the sporophytes and the capsules at their tip make the patch of moss look like a grove of derrishoul trees in miniature. It reminds him of the Andalite dome, now ruined and rotting on the ocean floor off the coast. It reminds him of one grove of trees that you can see from his scoop back on the homeworld. It reminds him how alone he is, how small, how far away. It hurts him to look at it, sometimes, hurts in a new way that scares him. It makes him feel weak, un-Andalite. 

It's a while before Ax has the idea of shaping the moss, making a landscape in miniature. There’s an old Andalite art that arranges the growth of certain plants to resemble landscapes, entire forests and savannas seen from the air or from very far away. It’s a grandmother’s art, never of interest to him before, but now he spends a week finding the perfect rock. He tries to visit it every day. At first he just studies it, memorizes the way the moss grows over the curve of the stone. He thinks about his people’s names for ecologies and transitions, those spaces and actions of betweenness that are important in themselves. Looking at the moss helps him to remember the derrishoul, the golden skies, the colour and texture of the bluegreen grass of his home that tastes so much better. 

Then he begins to shape it. He uses his tail blade and a small pair of scissors that Tobias found for him. He works in tiny increments, remembering the way the dome that brought together an entire piece of home. It’s the same principle. He shapes which kinds of mosses grow on the rock, how they mingle together. There’s a shallow depression in the rock that could serve as the lake.

Sometimes he visits the rock after a mission, exhausted, bloodied. Horrible things have happened, are happening all the time. Every day is fear and desperation; even in quiet moments it's there. This world is hard and loud and full of lonely minds, a planet with greater biodiversity than any other environment he has studied but with each creature so entirely separated from each other. It’s a broken world. A world of a trillion fragments.

But he gets books and learns new things. Learns that lichens, the not-quite-a-plant that dusts the rock with blue-green powdery spots, are one organism that contains two, a partnership, a truly excessive quirk of cooperative evolution. Only here, with so much life, would there be latitude for such unique accidents. Earth is a tough neighborhood, his friend Cassie says, and she's right; but these easily overlooked organisms, these flakes and dustings of color, are a discovery that would delight his people. 

And he also finds that humans, too, have an art of arranging and shaping plants to resemble larger ecosystems. They call it bonsai. Bon. Zai. Sai. Zai. Bon. Bohn. Bonssssss. An odd word. He obtains books about bonsai, about a place called Japan where humans build intricate temple gardens. In the pictures of the gardens, the tiny treescapes grown to look like a mountain peak, he can see that humans love their home, even if most do so poorly and carelessly. Sometimes they even understand it. Hear it. Talk to it. These gardens are whispered poems made of thought and time and relationships. (He spends hours alone in the woods in his human morph just so he can read the Japanese words in the book; Japanese is a language with the most entertaining, ingenous combinations of mouth sounds. He thinks that if he had landed in Japan he would have had a difficult time; he would play with mouth sounds all the time and would not pass as human so effortlessly.) 

Back to his small landscape. He wants a small stone of moss that holds in it a reminder, a memory, a hope. He tries to make the view from his scoop, the view he would see while he performed the morning ritual. But the memories of his home are becoming more difficult to call to mind, more difficult to recreate. He’s been here too long, and sometimes that thought comes on him like a panic. He’s changing too much, forgetting, stuck in this new life; this place gets inside him, makes him something new. So this rock, this tiny garden, it helps him to meditate on transition, the space where two ecosystems mingle, where organisms meet to make something new. A space of change that is, itself, a unique ecosystem. If he can complete this small garden maybe he can hold onto onto the home in his memories, onto his new home, hold it all together in himself, one changing, shifting whole.

**Author's Note:**

> Another old flash fic, this time edited a little before posting. One time I got really sad about how alone Ax is, and how he keeps himself so separate (especially in the earlier books), and so here we go.


End file.
